THANKFUL FRIDAY

Many of you may not know that I took the MCAT before I took the GRE to apply for grad school. I was still undecided about medical school. Honestly, I didn’t know what I wanted. Here is what I knew: I was flooded with excitement and wonder whenever I looked in a microscope and even the smallest scientific discovery made me clap my hands with glee. Life around us is fascinating and the tiny life forms of this planet are spectacular. I did very well on the MCAT, well enough to probably get in to medical school, but something told me that I would not find that life to be as fascinating.

When I started working for Margaret, I didn’t know anything about Dictyostelium, but I learned very quickly how to grow, culture and care for these little soil amebas, as well as manipulating them for microscopy viewing. When food is scarce for Dicty, they’ll send out a signal to other Dicty cells in the area. Then they all group together to form a slug that eventually transforms itself. The head of the slug becomes spores while the rest turn into a stalk with a fruiting body on the end containing dormant cells that can fall off under more favorable conditions. A large portion of the cell community dies so that some cells can live on later when there’s more food or the environment is nicer. We kept plates of Dicty in this form and I remember asking Margaret once about seeing them like this in the wild. She assured me that it was possible to find Dicty in the wild as fruiting bodies and since then I’ve been a little obsessed with the idea. 2022 was my year for seeing Dicty in the wild. First, Heather sent me a picture of them growing on her car. Then I found some hanging off my porch light. That sighting made me light up and immediately morph into Jordan from Real Genius. I excitedly told Michael all about the life cycle of Dicty while I took photos of our porch light.

Recently I’ve been talking to one of our graduate students about making miso. He’s been experimenting with trying to make his own koji (think starter, like sourdough, but with Aspergillus oryzae instead of yeast). This week he brought me a book on making koji and we had a long nerdy talk about trying to culture the powder koji starter that he has. I helped him get set up on a microscope and then went back to my desk. I started flipping through the pages of the book and came across some glossy prints of microscopic images and I got so excited. I ran back into the microscopy room and sat down next the grad student and started blathering about culturing and checking strains with microscopy and I got really excited about making my own miso. The part that excites about making miso has very little to do with making actual miso, but a whole lot to do with the science side of fermentation.

So here’s my gratitude. I am so grateful to be in a position where I have been able to maintain my excitement and enthusiasm for life sciences. With my job and the people I get to interact with every day, it sometimes feels like a dream. It is the difference between just having a job and getting to choose your job and that is a privilege.